Chihuahua Mountain
by Suki59
Summary: This is an entry for the Eric and Sookie: Cowboy up! One shot contest. Sookie and Eric find forbidden love up on Chihuahua Mountain and their lives will never be the same. AH, AU, OOC.


Chihuahua Mountain

By Suki59

Charlaine Harris owns these characters. I don't own Brokeback Mountain either, but I do own three chihuahuas.

This is for the Eric and Sookie: Cowboy up! One shot contest.

Thanks to my lovely beta, Thyra10, whom I love like a chihuahua.

I was so young when I met Eric. And so naïve. My world was small, growing up on my family's poodle ranch in Montana. All I knew was roping poodles, riding horses, and humping women. That's right, I was a lesbian, and proud of it. I figured I'd find myself a little missy and settle down, maybe start my own little ranch somewhere. But then all that changed the day I met Eric—well, not the day I met him. It was actually probably about sixty days or so after I met him. Whatever.

Anyway, I needed some spending money for the summer. I was a lipstick lesbian and lipstick ain't cheap, especially if you like the really fancy brands that are only carried in fine department stores. And I'd heard about a job herding chihuahuas for the season. Yeah, it was tough. It's cold up on Chihuahua Mountain and it takes a lot of those little fuckers to cuddle up to to keep warm at night, but I was desperate and it was the only job I could get. See, there was a recession on and unemployment was almost at nine percent in my county…sorry, that's not really important in this story. Let's get back to the herding.

The first time I saw Eric was in the tiny tacky trailer of Randy Quaid. He was out of work too, I guess. He was never as cute as Dennis, of course, but still his acting chops had procured him a decent resume on IMDb. I suppose an actor of his caliber just can't be seen waiting tables in Beverly Hills, so when he needed money, he became a chihuahua-wrangler-hirer. He'd put an ad on craigslist and apparently Eric and I were the first two to apply for the job, and so just like that, we were chihuahua wranglers.

I noticed that Eric was pretty much the best looking specimen of a male human I'd ever seen. He was tall with long blond hair, tanned skin (but not leathery like a lot of the local cowboys—they're way too macho to properly moisturize). His body was pretty much perfect, but it was his beautiful baby blues that really caught my eye. I'd never seen eyes that color and it made me want to…well…look at them. (Not much else—I was a lesbian, remember?)

And so, Eric and I headed up the mountain with our horses and chihuahua herd. Pretty soon, we settled into a routine partnership that worked for us both. I kept camp—fixing the meals, fiddling with the tent and supplies so it would seem like I was busy—too busy to do any real chihuahua-sitting up on the mountain. That shit was boring.

Eric did the chihuahua-sitting. He'd come back down to base camp every night and we'd share a pot of beans and a flask of whiskey and then he'd mosey back up the mountain, which was fine with me. It would have been impossible to hide the ritual gas leaks that seemed to fill the tent all night after all those beans, and lesbian or not, I just wasn't comfortable farting in front of guys. It's just gross. Finally, one night Eric asked if I could put something—anything—other than beans on the grocery list for the extra that met me for a supply delivery every week (why they couldn't give that guy a line was beyond me. He always looked so foolish just smiling and nodding every week.). Apparently, Eric was having some gas problems of his own and had lost a couple of pups to the toxic fumes. Once I explained that to Randy in a side note on my list, the food improved.

And my relationship with Eric improved as well. Something started happening between us. I can't really explain it other that maybe without any women to satisfy our primal desires, we both just started getting really horny and hard up for human companionship. His lame jokes started to seem funny. His gorgeous ass started to make me stare at it. I was practically smitten with the man. And then one cold night the unthinkable happened. Eric got too drunk to head back up the mountain and I stumbled into my tent and passed out. When I woke up, I was being cuddled by a giant cowpoke popsicle rubbing up against my back. Being that close to something with a heartbeat that was bigger than a chihuahua made my natural instincts kick in. I started fumbling around in the dark for my strap-on when suddenly it hit me: Eric is a man. It had been a tough cold sixty days up there on Chihuahua Mountain and hell, even Randy Quaid probably would have done it for me, but I didn't have to settle for the brother of hot. I had hot pressed nicely into my butt crack.

I rolled over and started to caress Eric's snausage. Seriously. He still had some dog treats in his pocket to keep the chihuahuas in line. I tossed it out of the tent and roughly kissed Eric on the mouth. I'd never felt whiskers against my face except that time Stephanie refused to get a bikini wax all summer on a dare. But this was different. It was manly. It was sexy. I was lost. Suddenly, we were both frantically undoing our belts and pulling our jeans down. Eric grabbed me and turned me over, pulling me back and up on all fours. I wanted it and I wanted it bad. He spit into his hand and rubbed it onto the tip of his gracious plenty and started to plunge it into my ass until I hissed over my shoulder, "You're straight, you idiot." That seemed to snap him out of it and the next thing I knew I was being ridden like a bucking bronco (but in my vagina, thank you). It was wild and it was fast, but I loved every minute of it. (No, of course I didn't come. That takes longer than three minutes, but still it was fun.)

We passed out, holding tightly to each other and too drunk to get our jeans back on, but at least we managed to get into a sleeping bag. The next morning, I was making coffee by the fire when Eric stumbled out of the tent hungover and looking at me sheepishly. I felt ashamed and so did he. Finally, I broke the silence. "I don't like dick."

"Me neither."

It really made no sense, but at least it broke the tension.

After that night, we had wild sex in the tent every night. I think Randy was on to us. Maybe it was that I had edible underwear and Astroglide on the supply list that first week, I don't know. Or maybe it was because of that time that he was sitting on his horse watching us fuck by the fire. That should have done it. At any rate, when the season was over and we herded the little doggies back down the mountain, I knew that he hated us. Sure, we'd lost most of the herd to coyotes and medical testing labs. I could see that we'd done a poor job of taking care of the herd, but I'd perfected my fellatio technique and that's not nothing.

Eric and I went our separate ways. Randy was glaring at us, mumbling something about getting our rose stemmed, whatever than meant. I went on and married Stephanie just like I'd planned and Eric went on to become a rodeo clown over in Texas. We stayed in touch with postcards and email, but clearly wanted to live our lives as normally as possible.

Stephanie squeezed out a couple of puppies after being artificially inseminated by my cousin. Eric married Anne Hathaway. She wasn't that big a star yet, so it was no big deal really—she'd done those princess movies with Julie Andrews, but not much more. Pretty soon they had a son and Eric was selling tractors. We were doing just fine.

Until the fishing trip. We'd made plans to go fishing up on Chihuahua but forgot our tackle boxes. There was really nothing else to do but fuck, and so before I knew it, we were right back in the throes of our former passion. At the end of the weekend, we got into a horrible fight. Eric wanted more than a "Same Time Next Year" relationship. Yeah sure, it worked for Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn, but I just didn't see how I could fit it into my life. Before I knew it, we were wrestling on the ground and I had him in a nipple hold. He started crying and I let him go. He wandered over to the edge of the lake where the light was better for his close-up and said, "I wish I could quit you." My heart broke for him—for both of us—and I could practically hear Rufus Wainwright singing a theme song for us. Then I realized that it was my ring tone and Stephanie was calling me. I was really impressed that I could get a signal up there and answered the phone, telling Stephanie I'd be home as soon as the crew could get the horses into the trailer and clean up the craft service table, pack up the equipment—that sort of thing.

And so, like a moth to a flame, I drove up to Chihuahua Mountain every year and had a mad passionate affair with Eric. I loved him. He loved me. Pretty soon, our love affair started to wreak havoc with our real lives. Stephanie knew I was cheating on her. It's hard to hide the long-term effects of the gracious plenty on a person's love tunnel. She finally divorced me (not legally, of course. Gay marriage was still illegal in Montana in spite of the strides gay rights were making in some other states, but that's another tale). I had to share custody of the girls. Anne Hathaway left Eric. She got the lead in that Meryl Streep movie and got all those cute clothes and he just couldn't compete with the glamour that came with all that. Eric started heading down to Mexico to get occasional head, which really pissed me off. Then he started fucking the wife of one of his friends at some cabin. I was dating a girl, but mumbled so badly into my pie after dinner every night that she finally left me. Eric and I were both a mess, lost in a world that just couldn't accept us.

I started to get too busy to meet Eric every year. Hell, he wanted to meet more than once a year. By that time, I'd gone back to work on my family's poodle ranch and that's some demanding work. Poodles are bigger than chihuahuas—at least standard ones are. It took a lot of my time and energy and I just couldn't get away as much as I wanted to. I had child support payments to make and my ex wasn't some rich Hollywood type rubbing elbows with the likes of that cute guy on Entourage like Eric's ex was. I had to wrangle poodles for a living and it's just not as easy as it sounds.

The last time I saw Eric, we were enjoying the outdoors on our magical mountain. Sure, we'd aged, but I just couldn't figure out how the makeup department got those crows' feet on Eric's face to look so natural. Yes, he looked older, but his body hadn't aged at all and let's face it, that's really what I loved about him the most. Nobody filled out a pair of Wranglers like my Eric. He pumped me all weekend and we professed our undying love. In the end, I got pissed about the trips to Mexico. He claimed he just had frequent flyer miles he needed to use up, but I knew he was getting blowjobs, and it hurt. I told him I knew what he'd been up to and he said, "You get mad at me for needing something I don't hardly never get!" I just shook my head sadly and wondered why all cowboys felt the need to use double negatives.

Eric wanted to return to the mountain in August, but that's prime poodle mating season and I told him I just couldn't get away. We wrestled again and this time he skillfully dodged my nipple twisting. Before I knew it, he'd undone my bra and completely removed it without even unbuttoning my western styled shirt. I watched him stuff it into his pocket before he drove away, leaving a trail of dust, some of which got into my eye, making me pretend that it was the dust that made me tear up and not my badly-broken heart. I don't think I was fooling any of the crew members standing around watching the scene.

I felt guilty about missing the August trip and wrote Eric an email apologizing, but it got bounced back. I was confused and did a quick google search, but learned nothing. In desperation, I finally called Anne Hathaway's people and left her a message. When she got back to me she confirmed my worst fears: Eric had been killed in a confusing flashback scene. It wasn't really clear what had happened, but I suspected that the locals were jealous of our unbreakable love that was born and nurtured up on Chihuahua Mountain and beaten him with a tire iron or something equally deadly that the prop department had lying around.

Broken-hearted, I drove out to his parents' ranch to pay my respects. His father was mean as a snake, but his mother offered me coffee and cherry cake. I'd never heard of cherry cake—cherry pie, sure. Now that made sense. I didn't want to get into it, so I just passed. I wandered through Eric's boyhood bedroom—checking out the old porn under the mattress, looking for evidence that he'd had a long-term thing with some senorita bitch, and then finally discovering my bra hanging in the closet, cleverly hidden under one of Eric's hopelessly seventies western shirts.

I stole the shirt and reclaimed my bra (they're not cheap, especially when you get into the double d cups). I went back to my sad little trailer and switched the two garments so that my bra was hanging on the outside of Eric's shirt. Yeah, it went against all rules of fashion, but it was symbolic of our love going against the rules of society and I thought made for a very thought-provoking metaphor.

On my last day of shooting, my almost-grown daughter stopped by the trailer to tell me she was marrying a rough neck. I never got the difference between a rough neck and a red neck, but the script supervisor said it was just semantics and not to worry about it. Besides, we were losing the light and I really needed to finish the scene. I was so touched that Junior invited me to her wedding that I poured us a drink and toasted to her and her rough (red?) neck fiancé. I teared up at how pretty she had gotten. Hell, she was pretty enough to co-star with Mark Wahlberg once she legally changed her name to anything other than Junior. She left without her little sweater and I ran after her, but she was already gone.

I trudged, defeated, back into my trailer of sad and delivered my final monologue to the shirt and bra hanging on the back of my closet door. It really wasn't much of a speech and made no real sense, but by the time it was edited with the music and everything, I knew there wouldn't be a dry eye in the house.

I felt pretty good about my performance overall, but I have to say, all kidding aside, I knew I'd never get over Eric and the love we shared up on Chihuahua Mountain.

Roll credits.

XXX

Yes, I know I'm under the three thousand word limit for this contest, and yes, the rules state that "we'll be a little lenient" in spite of a private message I got saying that my story was too short. Sure, the first SVM contest had word limit abusers in five out of seven of the finalists, including the winner and runner up, but heck, this is a different contest and maybe lenient means different things to different people. I know it sure meant different things to me and Eric in the sack (or sleeping bag, technically). Anyway, I got to thinking--do you think that Annie Proulx's editor gave her any shit about Brokeback Mountain being just a novelette instead of a regular-length novel? Heck, it went on to win an O. Henry Award, a National Magazine Award, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer. Then the film adaptation won three Oscars, and got another assorted seventy-eight awards and sixty-four nominations. After winning all those awards and earning that big old pile of money, do you think anyone dared mention phrases like "word count" to Annie Proulx? Or even had the nerve to ask her how to pronounce her name? I'm gonna say probably not. And so, in spite of the fact that this one-shot is a little on the short side, I'm going to square my shoulders and soldier on in the face of adversity. I learned how to develop a thick skin if nothing else in my forbidden love affair with Eric. I just know in my heart that this is what he'd want me to do in spite of the fact that I'm still really on the fence about that whole after-life thing and thinking that loved ones are "watching out" for us down here. It's a little creepy. And so I'm submitting my story just as it is: a heartfelt confession about something very drunk and naughty turning into a lifelong six-foot-five albatross hanging around my neck that was more beautiful than…well, a lot of really beautiful stuff. And just like Annie Proulx, I'm going to just put my story out there, and fingers and toes crossed, hope for the best. Well, I guess the best would be a Pulitzer and I seriously don't think I'll be in the running for that one. Hell, even Annie Proulx didn't win that. But maybe someone somewhere out there in fanfiction land will find my story and at least put it on her favorite stories list. And now that this rant has upped my word count to over three thousand, I just might be considered for a prize in the contest that I actually wrote it for. Is that too much to ask?

XXXXX

**Author's Note: Yes, this is me, Suki59, speaking now. I just want to make it clear that the last paragraph in the story is not an author's note, but a parody of one and it expresses the viewpoint of the character, Sookie, and not me. **


End file.
